Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the venerable New York Film Festival — and the departure of its longtime avuncular head, Richard Pena. So this edition, opening tomorrow and running through October 13th, will mean a new direction, and some startling changes, right?

Um, not exactly.

"The idea of coming in and making a big dramatic statement — 'Now, I'm here' — doesn't appeal to me," says Kent Jones, the festival's new director of programming. "If you come in saying 'I want to make this more about this' then you're saying `I have an agenda' — and you're sort of moving away from actually curating."

Which, Jones says, is how he sees the festival's real and continued mission — sorting through the hundreds, if not thousands of films being made in any given year, and trying to point audiences towards a few that might have something new to offer.

It's a job that gets more challenging all the time.

"I think back to the late `90s, when I first started writing for Film Comment, and people were just starting to talk about digital filmmaking, and I think about now," Jones says. "And they are two different planets."

And the one we live on now is definitely overpopulated.

"You know, Francis Ford Coppola once said cinema would never be a true art form until it was as cheap to make a movie as it was to paint a picture," Jones says. "And at this point we're pretty much there. But what Coppola said is that there would eventually be many, many more movies being made. He didn't say they were all going to be good."

Not the Bruce in 'Nebraska' you expected, maybe, but Dern is already getting Oscar talk.PARAMOUNT

Getting into the New York Film Festival, however, gives a movie a bit of a good-filmmaking seal of approval; it tells cineastes that a motion picture, whether or not it's to their taste, is probably going to be part of the cultural conversation, and something they should give some attention to. (And, yes, it also wakes up Oscar voters, too — plenty of award winners got their first real exposure at the NYFF.)

This year's selection is, as always, eclectic.

There are the big Hollywood offerings — including the opening-night screening of "Captain Phillips," with Tom Hanks as a kidnapped seaman, and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," with Ben Stiller as James Thurber's daydreaming hero. There will be new films from Alexander Payne (the road-tripping "Nebraska") and the Coen brothers (the folkie "Inside Llewyn Davis") both guaranteed to delight auteurists.

There are some slightly lower-profile, but still high-interest films too, including "Her" (director Spike Jonze, Joaquin Phoenix and a story about cyber love), "The Invisible Woman" (Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in a tale of Charles Dickens and a secret affair), "The Immigrant" (Marion Cotillard as a newcomer to 1920s New York) and "All Is Lost" (Robert Redford, cast adrift in the Indian Ocean).

And then there are the more offbeat offerings. Like the comic "Alan Partridge" movie from Steve Coogan, and the epic French lesbian drama "Blue is the Warmest Color." Like Agnieszka Holland's story of the Prague Spring, "Burning Bush," Jim Jarmush's alt-vampire story "Only Lovers Left Alive" and Jia Zhangke's anguished drama of modern China, "A Touch of Sin."

It's hard for anyone to pick a favorite — particularly the head of programming — but Jones has a few.

"I'm looking forward to seeing people discover 'Her,'" he says. "`Captain Phillips' is such an intelligent approach to the question of making a movie about a historical event, I was really surprised by it. I was absolutely taken aback by 'Burning Bush' — I've always admired Agnieszka Holland's work but I wasn't quite prepared for how ferocious this was... And 'How Democracy Works Now,' this ongoing series of documentaries we're presenting, I'm absolutely in awe of."

But, before you pigeonhole Jones — or the festival — as being interested only in the dark, cynical or deliberately provocative he also mentions "About Time," a surprisingly moving romantic fantasy from Richard Curtis, the director of "Love Actually."

"I'm sure people will be saying 'Oh, you were bought off by Hollywood, it's kowtowing to the studios," Jones says with a small smile. "But a great number of people on the selection committee are unapologetic fans of 'Love Actually.' I'm a fan of 'Love Actually,' and its director. And to see what he and Bill Nighy and the rest of the cast do here is wonderful, although I'm sure people will be talking about the fact that we chose it."

Of course, second guessing, and sometimes more heated disagreements, have always been part of the festival. And while Jones doesn't expect a repeat of the furor that once greeted selections like "In the Realm of the Senses" or "Last Tango in Paris," he notes that there are always a few walkouts, and that some of the films this year are sexually explicit, or starkly violent. ("Not for the faint-hearted," warns the program synopsis of James Franco's "Child of God.")

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But, again, strong audience reactions are a festival mainstay. Along with tributes (this year's honorees: Fiennes, and Cate Blanchett) revivals (from "Dazed and Confused" and "Providence" to "The Lusty Men" and "They Live By Night"), experimental films, shorts, roundtables, a mini-retrospective (Jean-Luc Goddard) and — just maybe — a surprise public screening of a major work in progress (previous fests offered sneak peeks at Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" and Martin Scorsese's "Hugo").

All of which, all at once, adds up to "a snapshot of where cinema is at right now," Jones says.

"And that's one of the things this festival has always had at its core," he adds. "It doesn't give out prizes, it wasn't set up as a market — it's always been about the selection. There is an imprimatur of sorts. And people can complain about those choices, they can dive into them, they can say why this and why not that? But that's part of the liveliness of it — that people, and actually the films themselves, end up having a kind of conversation."